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China and the Thucydides Trap
Graham Allison is probably best known to you as the author of Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis. I’ve always held him in high regard: He’s the old-fashioned, careful kind of political scientist (this as opposed to the new-fangled, addled-by-idiot-theory kind).
I just finished reading his very thoughtful and provocative article in The Atlantic, The Thucydides Trap: Are the U.S. and China Headed for War?
It’s very worth reading in full, but this is the gravamen:
The Greek historian’s metaphor reminds us of the attendant dangers when a rising power rivals a ruling power—as Athens challenged Sparta in ancient Greece, or as Germany did Britain a century ago. Most such contests have ended badly, often for both nations, a team of mine at the Harvard Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs has concluded after analyzing the historical record. In 12 of 16 cases over the past 500 years, the result was war. When the parties avoided war, it required huge, painful adjustments in attitudes and actions on the part not just of the challenger but also the challenged.
Based on the current trajectory, he argues, “war between the United States and China in the decades ahead is not just possible, but much more likely than recognized at the moment. Indeed … war is more likely than not.”
The methodology his team uses is about as rigorous as you can get in such analyses, which is to say not rigorous at all, but you can’t reasonably expect historical analysis to be rigorous in the manner of the hard sciences. (This is a point he’s careful fully to concede, to his credit.)
They’ve taken 16 case studies from the past 500 years, and they’ve used the words “rise” and “rule” according to their “conventional definitions,” which is to say, “generally emphasizing rapid shifts in relative GDP and military strength.” In 12 of these 16 cases, he notes, the result was war. (I would quibble with the word “result” — it suggests causation where in fact what we’ve established is correlation — but that’s a quibble.)
Here’s the graph:
So I’m trying to figure out why he’s wrong, because clearly, I don’t relish the idea of war with China. First thing I noticed — this jumped out at me at first glance — is that the analysis is predicated on the idea that the nuclear era is relevantly similar to the pre-nuclear era. As you can see, it’s only before the mid-20th century that the inevitable outcome of such a power shift — with one notable exception — was “war.” (I might even make the argument that the UK and the United States were, for all intents and purposes, the same power, so we could almost go with “without exception,” but maybe that’s stretching it.) Following the development of the atomic bomb, however, 100 percent of these power shifts end in “no war.”
Of course, when your data set comprises a mere three examples, “100 percent” isn’t as reassuring as you’d like, but still, that’s reassuring — isn’t it? Sort of?
The more complex question I’d ask about this data set is whether it makes sense to choose these case studies. For example, you could credibly argue that by the 16th century, the Ottoman Empire was already on the decline and the Hapsburgs were the rising power, if we’re going by the “conventional definitions” of relative economic and military strength. What’s more, the “conventional definition” is retrospectively imposed. The definition at the time was proven — by the outcome — to be wrong. (After all, the Hapsburgs won. By this point, we’re well into Ottoman corruption and decline; or at the very least, we’re well into lousy drill, inferior order, inefficient supply lines, lower-quality weapons, and comparatively undeveloped finance, bureaucracy, and scientific patronage — not to mention constant hassle from the Safavids and the Mamluks — so frankly, they never stood a chance; but the only way to know that is in retrospect. They certainly seemed terrifying at the time.)
That said, though I can see a few methodological problems with his analysis, he’s making too many good points for me to write it off. So I’m not inclined to shrug. And as he points out, neither are many other people who’ve exhibited a certain amount of geopolitical common sense over the years:
The preeminent geostrategic challenge of this era is not violent Islamic extremists or a resurgent Russia. It is the impact that China’s ascendance will have on the U.S.-led international order, which has provided unprecedented great-power peace and prosperity for the past 70 years. As Singapore’s late leader, Lee Kuan Yew, observed, “the size of China’s displacement of the world balance is such that the world must find a new balance. It is not possible to pretend that this is just another big player. This is the biggest player in the history of the world.” Everyone knows about the rise of China. Few of us realize its magnitude. Never before in history has a nation risen so far, so fast, on so many dimensions of power. To paraphrase former Czech President Vaclav Havel, all this has happened so rapidly that we have not yet had time to be astonished.
He notes that his students are consistently flabbergasted when he asks them this question: “In what year could China overtake the United States to become, say, the largest economy in the world, or primary engine of global growth, or biggest market for luxury goods?” He then gives them this quiz:
- Manufacturer:
- Exporter:
- Trading nation:
- Saver:
- Holder of U.S. debt:
- Foreign-direct-investment destination:
- Energy consumer:
- Oil importer:
- Carbon emitter:
- Steel producer:
- Auto market:
- Smartphone market:
- E-commerce market:
- Luxury-goods market:
- Internet user:
- Fastest supercomputer:
- Holder of foreign reserves:
- Source of initial public offerings:
- Primary engine of global growth:
- Economy:
(Pause for a moment and take it yourself, to see how you do. Then keep scrolling.)
Answer: China’s already surpassed the US on all of them. (By the way, how did you do? I got 16 out of 20. I thought I was right and he was wrong about the four I missed, but I looked them up, and nope — he’s right. Bonus: Who’s number two on FDI? Did anyone here get that right without looking?)
Take twenty minutes and read the whole article. He makes some very sobering points, and I can’t really find a way to argue with most of them, except to say, “Yes, but that was before the nuclear era.”
He concludes:
What strategists need most at the moment is not a new strategy, but a long pause for reflection. If the tectonic shift caused by China’s rise poses a challenge of genuinely Thucydidean proportions, declarations about “rebalancing,” or revitalizing “engage and hedge,” or presidential hopefuls’ calls for more “muscular” or “robust” variants of the same, amount to little more than aspirin treating cancer. Future historians will compare such assertions to the reveries of British, German, and Russian leaders as they sleepwalked into 1914.
The rise of a 5,000-year-old civilization with 1.3 billion people is not a problem to be fixed. It is a condition—a chronic condition that will have to be managed over a generation. Success will require not just a new slogan, more frequent summits of presidents, and additional meetings of departmental working groups. Managing this relationship without war will demand sustained attention, week by week, at the highest level in both countries. It will entail a depth of mutual understanding not seen since the Henry Kissinger-Zhou Enlai conversations in the 1970s. Most significantly, it will mean more radical changes in attitudes and actions, by leaders and publics alike, than anyone has yet imagined.
He doesn’t specify what kind of radical change or action, unfortunately. So here are the questions I’m left with:
1) Do you think he’s wrong? If so, why?
2) Are the case studies he’s choosing really relevantly similar?
3) If he’s right, what on earth should we do?
Published in General
The US’ participation is irrelevant to your thesis.
Mao is dead. The willingness of the men governing the PRC to go to war today is quite a bit less now. Even with Mao, it was more a matter of “Let’s you and him fight” than it was a matter of his own willingness actually to do the deed–and he had his own nukes in the latter part of his reign.
The PLA has gotten a lot better in the last few years, and its navy has improved. But the last time the PLA tried to fight a foreign war, Vietnam handed them their…hats.
Japan’s military is woefully small, but it’s much better trained and at least as well equipped. And they are experienced in both defensive and foreign wars. Too, anyone who thinks bushido is dead in Japan is taking an awful risk. And Japan has an organic missile defense system that’s capable of producing considerable doubt about the reliability of a PRC nuclear attack.
Numbers and cyber capability are all that Japan lacks.
Eric Hines
Japan might be farther along to rearming than widely understood. There’s been some discussion of a demographic deficit -Instugator posted a comment describing Japan’s pajama boy problem, which could impede rearmament goals.
It’s very hard to do–PM Abe is doing his damnedest to make the army more serious, more warlike & there is a lot of pushback against this. I do not believe the Japanese have become unable to wage war, but the politics make it very difficult.
At what speed? Being able to stay submerged and staying submerged while moving at a usable speed are not the same thing. Simply keeping people alive burns through the power way slower than moving the boat.
Can someone translate the translation for me?
My going guess is “Transcendent Day Dream.” or possibly “drug high.”
Cool. Quite a resource you are, Ms. B. Being a mathematician of sorts, I especially like Raif- ‘the ineffable interface between finity and infinity.’
Well these subs are all the rage these days – I am not the expert. To fully flex this muscle, though, requires local bases, which should be high on our priority list. “The nuclear submarines are $1.3 billion to 3 billion. The equivalent AIP submarines are half to four times cheaper.” Getting maybe three times as many super quiet subs into China’s near island chain area pretty much makes war with US futile. They would have no navy left after these guys went to work. They could lay all the smart mines in the world and not a ship would dare venture through the zone.
Well yes, but don’t you think that one of the drivers of the EU was to make sure that there was no repeat?
That was clearly a driver, it was also a complete illusion. The relatively recent peace in Europe has absolutely nothing to do with the creation of the EU.
I worked on a book a few years ago (2010) that scared the heck out of me: Handel Jones, ChinAmerica. China is facing depression, and the young people can’t find work to justify the years spent on a university education.
The only hopeful thing I can say is that the attempt to brainwash the Chinese people through the country’s public schools has been a failure. I’ve been working a book, and now a sequel, for the past eight weeks on China’s education system, and the kids aren’t buying the brainwashing.
There are vestiges of the Chinese government’s fear of giving freedom to the Chinese people throughout the country. When freedom is constricted (as in the churches throughout China that had their crosses hacked off a couple of months ago), and when the only people who have money are the tyrants, war is always a near possibility.
Indians might survive, but the Indian State would not. Which would be a deal breaker for most politicians, given their relationship to that State.
Plus – a proportion of the population just surviving (with significantly destroyed industrial and agricultural infrastructure, contaminated soil and water, so with the fullblown return of famine and pestilence) and more than likely living in areas that suddenly find themselves occupied and a part of North Sri Lanka, Western Myanmar and Southern Nepal – it just doesn’t look like a feasible strategy to me.
Are you saying a polity needs to be at some level uncivilised to successfully create and maintain an empire?
I think it’s fair to say that this was among the motivations — that fear is deep and primal here and always will be — but that by the time the Coal and Steel Treaty was signed, no one could credibly claim that without it, there would be a rematch. Germany was occupied and divided, its cities literally flattened, they were subsisting on about 1,200 calories a day, impressed into forced labor, and regularly raped by Russians. The treaty was certainly sold as a way of ensuring France and Germany would never again go to war, but the rather more effective part of the Permanent German Pacification strategy was dismembering and occupying it. A third of American troop deployments from 1950-2000 were to Germany. I reckon the presence of 10,000,000 US military personnel (not to mention the very thought, no less the sight of the Red Army) had much more to do with Europe’s postwar stability than the EU.
Not to be difficult, but unless Germany was going to be dismembered and occupied forever, didn’t they also need a very meaningful carrot?
So the proof of the pudding, if you will, was after the retreat of the Soviet Empire and the reunification of Germany.
I am not saying that I think this would be good for India. Clearly not. I’m only saying that I can conceive of no circumstance — not even nuclear war — that results in “no India.” (And being occupied by North Sri Lanka, Western Myanmar and Southern Nepal would just be yet another episode in the long Indian tradition of being occupied. Sooner or later everyone occupies India, and sooner or later everyone goes native or goes home.)
Claire,
I come upon this discussion very late I see. It took me a while to walk thru the 100 or so comments. The one thing that seems to be missing is the most obvious one. China is a Marxist tyranny. Although a few hundred million have been benefiting from the wild growth the vast majority of the population is in poverty and chains.
In the short term we are going to have all our military creativity pushed to the limit to match their threat. However, a long term strategy would involve an end to the Marxist regime. The internal inherent contradictions will come to the surface. We must start by believing in ourselves again. That will guide our approach to them.
We have only one advantage in the long term. Freedom.
Regards,
Jim
The Chinese, not surprisingly, learned from that and are developing petroleum sources around the world, including in South and Central America. Both ends of the Panama Canal are effectively under Chinese control.
Russia, China and the US are all heading into population crashes and the inability to support aging populations. Because of the one child policies, China still has a bulge of millions of males of military age with no peaceful prospects for marriage.
The natural resources in Siberia will go a long way to cushioning the landing of whichever country controls them, so don’t overlook the possibility of a war between China and Russia.
The pic in the original post reminds me of the opening to Rocky IV:
By the way, there are a lot of very good comments on this thread — and the researchers are asking for comments like these.
So if anyone feels like being helpful to them — and why not? — you could copy your comments to their files.
Number 10 on that graph was the topic of my dissertation.
That was exactly the argument in Europe in 1913. War was impossible because it cost too much and would be too disruptive of trade.
Public or political virtue in Germany is all tied up with peace. The recruitment of the political or ruling class is tied up with pacifism. The country neither has nor knows how to acquire arms. These were the conditions of the post-war political survival in Germany & they have not changed, either with the reunification, the collapse of the USSR or the expansion of the EU. Mr. Putin’s Russia is not going to change them either. This new understanding of political virtue was caused by the war & the way Americans ended the war. The EU is just one part of it.
Of course, the modern state is not especially built for peace & in certain ways is designed for war; of course, the people in Germany might again accept or even require a war ruler; but these are separate considerations & they do not depend on the EU, either…
Now, as to the business of nations that might survive nuclear war, I am not sure. Everything civilized would disappear, would be wiped out, including most books. Even in China or India, far more people depend on modern technology than did a generation ago. It’s not America, but fewer & fewer are self-reliant. What would happen after a massive war would be starvation & disease & then civil war or widespread gangsterism. It would be the end-
And just to brighten your day, in case you haven’t read this yet …
So what’s your answer? Relevantly similar?
I agree with Mr. Auslin’s judgment, however dislikable the tone, to say nothing of the prose. Why do these writers think strategic & political concerns have to be turned into a journalistic story? Well, I suppose that goes back to the age of liberal journalism & the smugness of the press & the big three… There is a pretense of knowledge there at which I cannot but smile.
All the silly talk about the multi-polar world… These people are so invested in believing in MAD that the old wisdom that two makes for war, three makes for peace has been abandoned. They tell you, you cannot go back to the future, but they are always caught in the strategic comfortable lies of American liberalism. In that story, for example, there was no China in the Cold War…
The finale is embarrassing: The Norks are not unpredictable. If these silly writers are right, why have not the Norks waged war? That would be unpredictable. The Norks took your money & got the bombs they threatened to build to get your leaders to pay. Is that unpredictable? You were had–do not let us turn moralistic.
Iran is fanatical? How come they do not wage all-out war?
Anyway, I’ll believe Americans involved in this strangest form of poetry–strategic thinking for politics–have changed when you show me people who talk about the uses & disadvantages of tactical nuclear war for America.
I believe it is not possible for human beings to refrain from deploying nuclear arms in war. I think it wise if some civilized people who have any influence think & write seriously about what can be achieved & what is to be feared in a serious nuclear war, not one of those hysterical fits about the end of the world coming tomorrow–unless wise, young, handsome JFK surrenders every time he’s challenged. The old story that the American military is a bunch of bloodthirsty innocent madmen–wise intellectuals must restrain them or else!–rather bores me…
If you allow me to recall your earlier romantic suggestion about having weaponry & saying one intends to use it as necessary: JFK bragged more than any American has or ever will. He made Wilson look measured… America was never going to have to face necessity again, to listen to him. The moral-political distinction between friend & enemy would be the only guide of American striving, to listen to him. Then the Berlin Wall happened. He did not much strive. Then Cuba happened. He lost Cuba & Americans learned to call that the extreme of manliness. He did not much strive there, either. One assumes there were no friends nor no foes involved in those minor incidents-
How much cost have we recovered when we’ve planted bases (Philippines maybe?), staffed and equipped them? Also, mining disputed waters makes us the aggressor in the problem, no?
I think you are wrong here. The Germans have some of the best weapons in the world, all developed at home or in connection with the other European states. The new version of the Leopard tank, which the Germans have just committed to buying is the equal of the latest version of the M1. The Panzerhaubitze 2000 is home grown and equal to the Paladin. The Eurofighter Typhoon is a premier combat aircraft. The Germans still know how to make weapons. Their diesel subs are considered the best in the world.
If you talk with folks in the US Army who interface with their German counterparts thru NATO, they will tell you the Germans are very professional and aggressive.
In short, while the government may be relatively pacifist now, they still have a army and arms industry capable of making war.
I contacted some Chinese friends and business acquaintances of some mutual friends, about a dozen in all, at the end of the summer, because I’d been offered a very lucrative teaching post in China, they all said, all of them, “Don’t go.” I wanted to go, Mrs. Salieri, not so much. The main reason they offered besides pollution, over-crowding, lack of trust of businesses to pay and keep promises, and an increasing general disregard for human life:
They fear war or revolution or at least a heavy dose of violence from the regime is coming very soon.
Their relatives who are still in China, and three of them had returned from family visits this summer, are all very nervous over the current economic situation and believe that a crackdown is coming to prevent revolution. The fear is that a turndown in the economy will stoke up the pent up desire for more economic and political freedom and bring the house of cards down. They realize the leadership knows this is the general rumor of the day, and are watching closely to see the first signs of movement. According to them the greatest danger isn’t a long term slow boil to a conflict, but a sudden recession, which results in a coup at the top or a push for a small scale military adventure to act as a safety valve and that valve gets out of hand.
I do not doubt that they have the tech. But that is nothing to do with what I was saying–let me grant it now that you bring it up, so that we do not get sidetracked. We have to questions. What are the arm What is the mind? With respect to the first: What numbers do they have? How many tank crews? How many pilots? How many sub crews? With respect to the second: Where are Germans publicly going to war, sending men to kill & die, & how is the people showing its support? Where are the politicians who attempt to gain support by or for war & the armed forces?